I’ve been using Pidgin with OTR (off the record plug-in), but I think Jitsi is a much better all round solution, particularly with the video component. Encryption is a must have for many people nowadays, so this will contribute to the arsenal of tools readily available. There will come a time soon when ALL communications from users onto the Net will be encrypted end-to-end. No more eavesdropping.

First I hoped Jitsi will work better than linphone. yap, the setup is easy, but the cracking sound on Ubuntu 12.04 makes it useless. I found (http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.voip.sip-communicator.devel/11738) that it isn’t working well on Ubuntu, which has builtin PulseAudio support. In Jitsi you cannot choose PulseAudio, you only have PortAudio or Java. So I’m back to linphone

SIP on linux is a nightmare. I have also tried lots of softphones currently I use SFLphone, because it had the least bad voice quality. It has pulseaudio support, but you still get echos no matter what echo cancelling setting you use.

We have an asterix switch and the desk phones and windows softphone all work OK. It is just on linux that I have the echo and other audio problems.